The Human History of Arctic Russia

A Norwegian explorer named Ottar was one of the first to sail east in search of a northern sea route above Europe and Asia that would connect the two land masses by sea. After leaving Norway in 870, Ottar eventually reached the White Sea in northwestern Russia, although he was stopped there by ice.  By the 12th century, people from central Russia – not Norway – migrated to the White Sea region, displacing the native people. These inhabitants, known as the Pomores, used shallow-draft sailing vessels to explore the Arctic waters and coastline.  In Russia, they are the equivalent of the North American Inuit people – the inhabitants of the Russian Arctic with the oldest remaining ancestral ties to the region.

Around 1553, Sebastian Cabot, the son of John Cabot, received funding for a British voyage to discover the Northern Sea Route, which the British hoped would prove a shorter trade route over the north of Europe and Russia to China. Under the command of Richard Chancellor, one of Cabot's three ships, the Edward Bonaventure, arrived at modern-day Arkhangelsk in Russia.  Here, Ivan the Terrible greeted them warmly. Later, Chancellor succeeded in negotiating a trade treaty that made his London merchant financiers rich. In the ensuing years, the newly formed Muscovy Company, composed of many of the same British merchants, financed other voyages in the region in an attempt to leverage trade with the Russians and discover a route to China. This continued until a 1580 voyage composed of two ships, the William and the George, resulted in the total loss of the William.

By 1594, in spite of a failed voyage led by Belgian explorer Olivier Brunel and the hardships of the English voyages, the Dutch had become sufficiently interested in finding a northerly route to China to fund an expedition. Willem Barents, after whom the Barents Sea off the coast of northern Russia is named, set out to attempt to round the island of Novaya Zemlya's northern tip but was repulsed by solid ice around seventy-seven degrees North latitude. However, when Barents rendezvoused with the other voyage commander, Cornelius Nai, he was encouraged to discover that Nai had successfully navigated the Kara Sea and turned back convinced that there was an open sea route north of Russia.  This prompted the House of Orange to finance a larger mission, which was blocked by ice in the Yugorski Shar Strait in 1595. At that point, the Dutch government decided to offer a reward to any Dutch sailor who could discover the passage rather than finance another mission. In 1596, Amsterdam merchants responded by funding a two-boat voyage that once again included Willem Barents and discovered the Svalbard archipelago off of northern Russia. One of the ships headed home, but the ship Barents was aboard headed still further east. In the winter, the ship and its crew became trapped by the ice; only twelve of the seventeen crewmembers made it through to spring and were rescued by the expedition's other ship, which had turned about the previous year before returning to look for them.  Hardships along the Northern Sea Route and the success of voyages along other trading routes led the Europeans to focus their efforts in other regions, with only one further unsuccessful voyage by the Englishman Henry Hudson of the Hudson Bay Trading Company.

Thus, this stretch of the Arctic, today considered a crucial piece of Russia's economic future because of its oil, gas and seabed mineral reserves, was left largely to the Russians. Early voyages financed by a wealthy Russian merchant family, the Stroganovs, led the Russians into Siberia. Here, they discovered a wealth of furs that drove a massive Russian expansion eastwards led primarily by fur trappers and religious dissidents. These people and their descendants explored the vast region by water, even establishing northern ports. By 1630, the Russians reached the Lena, the most easterly of three major Russian rivers that flow into the Arctic.

The pattern of eastern expansion by the Russians continued in the decades to come. In 1648, seven boats and ninety men set out towards the Anadyr River in southern Chukotka, a region in northeast Russia rumored to be rich in furs. Eventually, the men were shipwrecked; however, they built boats out of driftwood and eventually returned to Russia with valuable walrus ivory.  Their voyage was significant because it was the first to pass through and voyage south of the Bering Strait. However, the expedition was forgotten for nearly a century. Not until a dying Peter the Great, interested in mapping Russian's northern borders and exploring whether the Asian and American continents were connected, signed a decree appointing an expedition led by Vitus Jonassen Bering, a Russian Imperial navy officer of Danish descent, did a similar voyage of discovery take place.

The preparation for Bering’s voyage took more than three years as the expedition leader and his men set out eastward over land, enduring immense hardship, to build their ships on the Pacific's western shore for the ocean portion of their voyage. Bering's expedition failed to conclusively prove that no land bridge between the Asian and American continents existed and returned to Russia without any significant discoveries. However, a second voyage undertaken by Bering did discover some of the northern Aleutian islands in North America. The explorer later died of scurvy in the area on what is now Bering Island. The British explorer James Cook named the Bering Strait and the Bering Sea after him.

Russian interest in the commercial potential of the Arctic sparked investment well beyond Bering’s voyage, though. Indeed, Bering’s journey was only one part of a great Russian expedition that set out to map the Russian coast from the White Sea to Chukotka and determine the feasibility of a northern sea route connecting Europe and China. With much difficulty, this multi-party expedition succeeded in mapping the majority of the northern Russian coast by 1740.  While the findings of the explorers did not indicate that a coastal northern sea route was likely to exist, Mikhail Lomonosov, a contemporary of the explorers', believed that a seagoing route further to the north might exist. As such, he planned a seagoing northerly voyage. However, Lomonosov died a few days before his journey, which would in the end be stopped by ice, set out.  Any sea route north of Russia, and the accompanying economic and strategic potential, remained elusive at best.

On June 22, 1878, more than a hundred years after Lomonosov's expedition was stopped by ice, the Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld embarked from southern Sweden in search of the Northern Sea Route. Nordenskiöld continued through a virtually ice-free route above northern Russia until stopped by ice on the northern coast of Chukotka. He and his crew wintered off Cape Dezhnev, just a few days' sail beyond their first encounter with ice in Chukotka, and after trading with the local Chukchi – who knew a few words of English but no Russian – made the Bering Strait the following year, continuing around the world and arriving in Sweden on April 24, 1880 to honorary accolades.  Following generations of efforts by various nations, it was a Swede rather than a Russian who first sailed the Northern Sea Route west-east in its entirety.

In a blow to national pride, the Russians were not to have the second west-to-east transit of the North-East Passage either. That accomplishment belongs to the same Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, who between 1903 and 1906 made the first successful transit of the Northwest Passage. Amundsen set out in 1918 along the Northern Sea Route. He completed the Northern Sea Route, crossing into the Pacific Ocean. However, after a long voyage with the end goal of studying tidal flow in the Canadian Arctic by drifting with the ice, Amundsen abandoned his mission and headed for the United States' West Coast. His ship, the Maud, was later abandoned by a new owner at Cambridge Bay in northern Canada.  Both Nordenskiöld and Amundsen’s voyages showed that while a Northern Sea Route existed, it was an ice-clogged and dangerous passage, not a commercially viable shipping route.